Adolf Hitler's homosexuality has been demonstrated beyond question by German historian Lothar Machtan's massively researched new book, The Hidden Hitler, which shows homosexuality's central role in Hitler's personal life.

But the crucial role within the Nazi movement of the most vicious and lawless types of homosexuality, which Machtan also shows, is even more important than Hitler's personal preference. In 1933, six months after Hitler took power, the distinguished Jewish author Ludwig Lewisohn described what Machtan confirms, that "the entire [Nazi] movement is in fact and by certain aspects of its avowed ideology drenched through and through with homoerotic feeling and practice." And those homosexual currents inextricably were connected with vicious German militarism long before the Nazis.

Hitler quit school at age 16 and in 1909 moved to Vienna, where he twice took and failed the Art Academy's entrance examination. Shortly after his move, August Kubizek, a young man from his hometown, joined him and they lived together for four months. Intensely jealous, Hitler wrote Kubizek, "I cannot endure it when you consort and converse with other young people."

Hitler's adolescent move to sexually liberated Vienna  so new to him and so different from home  and his open choice there of homosexuality calls to mind the choice involved in what Charles Socarides calls America's "Thanksgiving Day Massacre." His book, Homosexuality: A Freedom Too Far, describes that "massacre" as when a college freshman, home for the first time after months at a sexually liberated college, joyfully informs his startled parents, "Hey Mom, hey Dad! Be thankful! I have something to tell you. I'm gay!"

For the next several years, Hitler drifted aimlessly. Despite immense Nazi efforts to erase as much of his past as possible (by destroying his massive police records, for example) Machtan dug out clear evidence of Hitler's homosexual activities during this period, such as his five months at a men's hostel known as "a hub of homosexual activity." He formed close attachments to several men, but throughout his life was uninterested in relationships with women.

In May 1913, he moved with another young man to Munich (said to be "a regular El Dorado for homosexuals") and, in September 1914, joined the Bavarian army. He spent the war years as a behind-the-lines messenger, enjoying a long and active sexual relationship with another runner, Ernst Schmidt. At war's end, Hitler returned to Munich and more homosexual activities.

He met at that time Capt. Ernst Roehm, a well-connected army officer who soon offered him his first job  as a political spy for the army within a newly organized workers' party. Hitler's political rise from that point was "meteoric," Machtan writes. Politically "an unknown quantity" when he joined the party in 1919, three years later he had become an important political influence  "the repository of the deutsch-folkisch [roughly German ultranationalist] movement's hopes."

Hitler's rise largely was due to the two brilliant homosexuals who mentored and tutored him: Roehm, a notorious pederast and a contemporary, and Dietrich Eckart, 21 years his senior. Roehm, a career staff officer during the war, had access to both secret army funds and to military and right-wing groups such as the ultranationalist, anti-Semitic and homoerotic Freikorps  the fiercely anticommunist terrorist squads that sprang up, especially in eastern Germany, in response to the political chaos of the early Weimar Republic. Eckart was a fiercely anti-Semitic journalist and playwright who taught Hitler political tactics and introduced him to Munich and Berlin society, as well as to other wealthy people throughout the country.

In April 1923 Hitler was convicted of treason for his nearly successful coup against the Bavarian government. Sentenced to five years in prison, he was released after nine months. He then began collecting the lawbreakers, sexual and other, who would form the heart of his new Nazi Party. Machtan shows that the party was a sexual swamp from its very beginning, an evil conspiracy in which members held sexual or other criminal secrets over one another's heads. Indeed, Machtan suggests that Hitler's fear that Roehm and other openly homosexual Nazis would "out" him and his associates was a motive for his later murder of Roehm.

The Nazi Party, whose terrorism and conspiracy had won it a maximum of 37 percent of the popular vote, took power in January 1933. In June 1934 Hitler had Roehm  his mentor, one-time closest friend and head of his 3 million-man storm-trooper organization (S.A.)  murdered, along with many of Roehm's homosexual party loyalists and hundreds of nonhomosexual opponents. These peremptory murders destroyed the rule of law in Germany and opened the door for the Holocaust's unprecedented brutalities.

The massacre, and the tighter laws against homosexuality that followed, are used falsely today, especially by some Holocaust-remembrance enterprises, to show that the Nazis actively opposed it and that they persecuted homosexuals just as they did Jews, only to a lesser extent. In a 1931 exposé of the Nazi Party, two years before it took power, the Munich Post attacked "the disgusting hypocrisy that the party demonstrates  outward moral indignation while inside its own ranks the most shameless practices prevail," and said that "every knowledgeable person knows that inside the Hitler party the most flagrant whorishness contemplated by paragraph 175 (defining homosexuality as a criminal offense) is widespread." Machtan confirms that Nazi hypocrisy, noting how "homosexuality was simultaneously proscribed and protected: Hitler had tailored it to his political and personal requirements."

Serious political errors mar this remarkably researched book. The most important involves the role of Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), the well-known Jewish homosexual psychiatrist-researcher whom Machtan calls "the pope of homosexuality," and his being used as an unquestioned authority on the subject. Hirschfeld, recently honored at a conference at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, spent his life seeking to repeal section 175 and get homosexuality accepted. Why then was he such "an object of hatred" by the Nazis and their Freikorps predecessors, with Eckart, for example, viewing him "with positively pathological loathing?"

The answer is the "two irreconcilable philosophies linked by a common dysfunction" [homosexuality] that existed then in Germany: the "Butches" (or "Machos") and the "Femmes," whom Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams differentiate in their invaluable book, The Pink Swastika. "The roots of this conflict span a 70-year period which saw the rise of homosexual militancy in the movement that gave Nazism to the world." Machtan mentions neither the conflict nor the Lively-Abrams book.

The Butches were openly and deliberately lawless. They defied criminal statutes, including those governing homosexuality. As criminals, they were not concerned with trying to change the law. They were anti-Semitic, militaristic and gratuitously brutal. Their sexual ideal was the man-boy relationship extolled and engaged in by the Greeks, Crusaders and Teutonic knights. They considered these pederastic activities morally superior to sex with women, whom they despised as useful only for breeding. Their deepest hatred often was directed against the Femmes and, especially, Hirschfeld, whom they reviled as effeminate and therefore contemptible.

"Femmes," reported variously to be perhaps 5 percent to 15 percent of all homosexuals, saw homosexuality on the same moral level as heterosexuality, rather than above it. They supported the overall rule of law and opposed pederasty and sadomasochism. Many were involved in artistic and scientific activities  dance, music, theater and medicine  and persuaded many German intellectuals, liberals and Jews of homosexuality's acceptability. This acceptance of Femme homosexuality, based partly on seeing homosexuals as a harmless, often creative, "persecuted minority," seriously undermined public awareness of the true threat and acute danger of Macho homosexuals.

Hirschfeld inadvertently helped the Nazis in another way: by keeping many Nazi sex criminals out of prison. Lively and Abrams describe this, but Machtan doesn't. The Prussian authorities, rather than incarcerating many of these criminals, referred them instead for psychiatric treatment at Hirschfeld's Sexual Research Institute. The institute consequently collected an immense amount of material about Nazis' sexual crimes. That's why its records were the first fuel chosen for Nazi book-burning.

Another probable reason for Hitler's anti-Semitism is traditional Judaism's appreciation of women and its fierce opposition to homosexuality and the debasing of women. German-Jewish historian Samuel Igra describes this in his neglected 1945 book, Germany's National Vice. Machtan cites the book but not the concept.

The same assistance Hirschfeld and other Jewish homosexuals, and their liberal and psychiatric supporters, inadvertently gave Nazism by accepting homosexuality is demonstrated by the review of The Hidden Hitler in the New York Times Book Review by psychiatrist Walter Reich, former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Totally ignoring the viciousness of Macho homosexuality, its intimate connection with German militarism and its pivotal role in creating Holocaust brutalities, Reich suggests that if Hitler was indeed homosexual that "may actually serve to humanize" him. When will today's liberal supporters of homosexuality, organized and otherwise, recognize how deliberate defiance of traditional sexual morality can lead to that deliberate defiance of all traditional morality, which defined the Holocaust!

Several months ago, I heard an interview on Dr. Stanley Monteith's radio show (Radio Liberty) of an author who's book dealt with this. It was called The Pink Swastika - by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. I did a google search on Pink Swastika and found many references.

What nonsense. Why do these pseudoscholars keep finding a need to make up ridiculous assertions?

Whether Hitler was homosexual or heterosexual, I personally suspect his preference was rather irrelevant to his desire to rule massive amounts of land mass with unquestioned power over life and death.

And quite frankly, the posted article appears to be little more than an attempt to cast the specter of genocidal fascist tendencies upon anyone not of the author's sexual orientation.

Now, if you want to know something really bizarre about Hitler's sex life - here's an anecdote. Of the seven women he is known to have had sexual relations with, six attempted suicide and five succeeded.

There is a Gay Republican group called the Log cabin Society. So named because they believe that old Abe was gay, because he once maybe-we-think-we-heard-we-don't-know-for-sure-but-it-is-a-good-story-anyway, shared a double bed with another man (a fairly common practice back then).

So extending this to Adolf being gay, maybe we should now refer to organized Gay groups along these lines, how about:

Nazis wore flamboyant costumes as uniforms. Lots of silver trim, fashionable black, and fancy armbands. Some Nazi uniforms even had pink piping along the fringes. Just look at their officer's hats, for crying out loud. Don't even get me started on the Nazis' shiny knee-high boots.

Yeah, this seems like just more lame gay bashing -- but I have to agree that what goes around comes around. Gay advocates are always claiming historical figures they like were closet gays -- on little or no evidence. So I guess they can't complain too hard when the same tactic is reversed on them.

Never the less, Nazism is not to be blamed on homosexuality anymore than it was to be blamed on Darwin or whatever the current anti-fad of the day is.

Power lust is bad and it occurs in all types and orientations of people.

I have read hints before that Hitler swung both ways. And outright assertions that his inner circle was very homosexual. He gathered thugs around him that he "had the goods on" so they would do EXACTLY what he wanted.

What a bunch of cr*p. Anyone who has done the slightest amount of research regarding Hitler will realize that he was never the same after his niece, Geli Rabaul, commited suicide after his affair with her. She began an affair with his chaffeur, he found out about it, and went nuts (yeah, even more than usual). His jealousy apparently drove her to do herself in. Doesn't sound like a homosexual's behavior to me.

Their sexual ideal was the man-boy relationship extolled and engaged in by the Greeks, Crusaders and Teutonic knights.

Hitler's possible homosexuality is an old story (on which I'm agnostic), but this is the first time I've run across this assertion about Crusaders and Teutonic knights. Anybody know what that is based on?

I don't know if Hitler was gay or not, but I do know that this writer's is full of it. He says Hitler was associated with the right wing and fierce anti-communists. But we all know for a fact that since the word "socialist" appears in the name of the NAZI party, that they (and Hitler) had to be LEFT-wing and PRO-communist.

The Nazis stood for "National Socialism"....not to be confused with communism. Their right wing politics were so called because of their strong Nationalistic feelings of Aryan omnipotence...not to be confused with a right wing republican of the present day.

"Now, if you want to know something really bizarre about Hitler's sex life - here's an anecdote. Of the seven women he is known to have had sexual relations with, six attempted suicide and five succeeded."

No, I didn't know that. But, those odds are just tooooo wild. Don't you think they may have been murdered? Perhaps the Fueher was just a bit paranoid about his abilities in bed? :(

I have read hints before that Hitler swung both ways. And outright assertions that his inner circle was very homosexual. He gathered thugs around him that he "had the goods on" so they would do EXACTLY what he wanted.

"Few people knew about the affair Adolf Hitler had with his niece, Geli Raubal, when he was 38 and she was only 17. Geli came to live with Hitler in his house in Berchtesgaden with her mother, Angelika Raubal - his widowed half-sister and the only one of his relatives he was on good terms with. The couple shared a strangely intense passionate relationship in the early years they spent together, but it was always dogged by Hitler's hopeless intolerance, chauvinistic attitude to womanhood and his perpetual possessive jealousy. Later, the significant weakening of the bond between Hitler and Geli coincided with the phenomenal rise in the popularity of the Nazis. On 14 September 1930, nearly six-and-a-half million people voted for the party that was, by then, virtually Hitler's personal possession. He had achieved unchallenged supremacy as leader, and this idolization by his public lessened his need to idolize Geli. His tenderness became twisted and his behaviour even more oppressive. In 1931, aged 21, Geli Raubal was found dead in the Munich flat she shared with Hitler; his revolver on the floor and an unfinished letter on the table. Hitler was absolutely shattered by his niece's death, and for the rest of his life was unable to speak of her without tears coming to his eyes. However, despite the obvious depth of Hitler's feelings for Geli and the enormous importance of their relationship in his life, there is scarcely mention of their strange uncle-niece bond."

Five suicides? Sorry, I don't buy it. Her death may have seemed like a suicide, and maybe it was a suicide, but I DO NOT believe that any man can cause that many women to commit suicide. The ones that follow cause me to doubt the first. The man was a sicko. The man murdered millions. I'm supposed to believe that all these women killed themselves? I gotta' bridge......

I hate defending this ass, but this is obviously revisionist history at it's worst. The author never offers any evidence that prove Adolf was a fairy. Some how the fact that these idea's were put in print is supposed to make us beleive they are true? I have no time for this non-sense.

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